The folks who live near the Shops at Friendly who managed to stop a Trader Joe’s from locating on the corner of Hobbs Road and Friendly Avenue might be interested in a report from Business Insider released last month.
According to a study of home prices, those living near a Trader Joe’s saw their property values increase 67 percent over the past five years. Living near a Whole Foods, by comparison, resulted in a 52 percent increase and near an Aldi a 51 percent increase.
So their property values would have increased and the rest of Greensboro would have had a Trader Joe’s if the protests had not been so vehement as to make Trader Joe’s decide it really didn’t want to do business in Greensboro.
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The Greensboro City Council is made up of eight Democrats and one Republican, but it appears the current City Council is taking its lead from our current Republican Congress, which didn’t meet in August and is only meeting for 12 days in September.
The Greensboro City Council only met once in July, once in August and is meeting once in September. In the old days, like earlier this year, the City Council met three times a month. It held two formal meetings and a more informal work session. Under the current leadership, the work sessions have been shortened from half-day sessions to maybe an hour, and they are held right before the meeting when everyone is in a hurry to get to the formal meeting. Maybe it’s to save gas so councilmembers don’t have to drive to city hall twice.
The good news is that when the City Council doesn’t meet it can’t do anything, and if it doesn’t do anything it can’t do anything wrong. So one way to look at it is that by not meeting the Greensboro City Council has made Greensboro a better place.
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Politico ran a cartoon last week portraying white Houston residents as dumb Southern racist Christian redneck cowboys who love their state and are proud of their heritage. So the cartoonist managed to get in just about every stereotype of white Texans in one cartoon.
It was evidently considered appropriate by the Politico editors because everyone at Politico has learned to accept the fact that Southerners are stupid Christian racists who are proud of their heritage.
Despite that, the editors say they don’t have anything against Southerners. In fact, some of their best friends are Southerners.
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Newspapers are rightly accused of writing about an issue and then not following up to tell people what happened. So not to fall into that trap, here is an update on the story about the easements that Rocky Scarfone has through what will be a downtown city parking deck with a Westin Hotel on top of it between East Market Street and across February One Place behind the Elm Street Center.
At-large City Councilmember Mike Barber on Wednesday said, “I think we’re close to a solution.”
He said, “The goal must be that all of these businesses downtown are compatible.”
Barber added, “It’s a lot better to solve it now before the parking deck is built.”
The easements reported on last week do exist and reportedly parts of the city parking deck are being redesigned to honor those two easements – one to East Market Street and one to South Davie Street – so that Scarfone will have the access to the back of the Cone Denim Entertainment Center building to which he is entitled.
